The present invention relates to paging receivers, in general, and more particularly, to a paging receiver operative to receive and accept a call signal including a receiver characterization portion which is decoded by the paging receiver to govern processing operations, characterized by the characterization portion, in regard to call signals corresponding to specified assigned call addresses of the paging receiver.
In modern paging systems, a common carrier transmits call signals to its subscribers utilizing a predetermined transmission protocol. The subscribers may lease or purchase a paging receiver from the common carrier for receiving page calls and/or messages contained in the call signals transmitted by the common carrier. The carrier may provide a wide variety of message services, like individual messages, group type messages, and messages containing information like stock quotes, sporting event scores, and the like, for example. A subscriber may subscribe to any one or more of these services in which case, his or her paging receiver is programmed with a call address for each such service. Accordingly, a subscriber is generally required to pay a flat rate on a monthly or a quarterly basis to the common carrier for each service to which he or she is subscribing. For example, a subscriber may have a paging receiver programmed with a unique individual call address, a group call address which may be common to a number of other subscribers, and an information service call address which would be common to all subscribers of the information service.
The common carrier is confronted with the problem of what to do when a subscriber fails to remain current in the rate payments for one or more of the services he or she is subscribing to. A desirable approach would be to have paging receivers capable of being disabled and re-enabled by the transmitted call signals of the common carrier.
Examples of proposed paging receivers for carrying out these objectives are found in the following U.S. Patents: U.S. Pat. No. 4,639,726, entitled "Radio Communication Apparatus Disabled on Reception of a Predetermined Signal", issued Jan. 27, 1987 to Ichikawa et al.; and
U.S. Pat. No. 4,706,272, entitled "Paging Communication System", issued Nov. 10, 1987, to Nishimura et al.
The Ichikawa patent appears to be directed to a paging receiver which may be non-recoverably disabled by a call signal transmitted from a paging terminal. Once disabled, the paging receiver would have to be taken to a special reprogramming center in order to re-enable the receiving operations thereof. The paging receiver of Ichikawa may include certain "canned" messages in its memory which may be displayed upon being disabled.
On the other hand, the Nishimura patent appears to be directed to a paging receiver which may be disabled and re-enabled with call signals. In the Nishimura paging receiver, a single assigned call signal is accepted and examined for either an inhibit or restart instruction. The inhibit instruction inhibits display of subsequent messages received by the inhibited paging receiver. Conversely, the restart instruction releases the display inhibition mode of the paging receiver and allows it to subsequently process and indicate messages on the display of the paging receiver.
Another known paging receiver is believed to respond to a call signal having a disabled instruction which causes the paging receiver to cease searching for all but one of its programmed call addresses. The pager may subsequently be enabled upon the reception of a call signal including the remaining active programmed address followed by a unique data message including an enable instruction.
The aforementioned proposed paging receivers appear to include a number of drawbacks. One such drawback is that the disabled paging receivers are apparently not capable of storing received messages of a disabled service, nor are they apparently capable of indicating to the subscriber the number of messages received and stored while the service is disabled. In addition, none of the proposed paging receivers are capable of receiving and processing a message for display on a display of the paging receiver to be displayed during disablement of a particular service to provide the subscriber of the reason(s) why the particular service has been disabled. Still further, the foregoing described paging receivers do not offer a way of recovering transmitted messages during a period of disablement.
Another area of concern involves, for example, a subscriber which subscribes to a plurality of services including individual and information type messages and fails to remain current on the rate payments for the information services while continuing to pay for the individual message service. The present state-of-the-art paging systems do not appear to be capable of over-the-air disabling and re-enabling a specified service without affecting the other subscribed services of a subscriber's paging receiver. Information messages is one service which is inherently difficult for a common carrier to disable and re-enable regarding an individual subscriber.
The present invention is directed to a paging receiver which overcomes the aforementioned drawbacks and offers other advantages and features not found in paging receivers of the foregoing described type. These features and advantages will become more evident from the following description of the preferred embodiment and associated drawings.